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Map Quest

A relatively short time ago, short time ago, in what was to some that heavenly stretch predating the fall 2008 financial quarter, people spent money on things — executives on gilded office renovations; uptown women on Restylane and luxury retail; and publishers, occasionally, on fiction by the young and unknown. Editors could still accommodate a degree of financial risk in their acquiring, and so it came to be that Reif Larsen, a 28-year-old graduate of Brown and Columbia, with his explorer’s name and brief history promoting a Botswanan marimba band, ignited the spending impulses of the publishing world, producing such a fire that he extracted a reported $1 million for his first novel, “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet,” a book in which each page seems a vitrine constructed to exhibit the author’s discursive, magpie imagination.

T. S. Spivet — Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, and isn’t there a Lemony Snicket quality to the name? — is our protagonist and narrator, the son of a Montana rancher whose C.V. would already gain him easy entry to any of the finer Eastern universities, though he is only 12. It speaks to Larsen’s talents that he has finessed the character in such a way that his precociousness endears rather than obtrudes. Cartography is the child’s primary gift and avocation, but his areas of subspecialty extend to entomology, anatomy, McDonald’s, Native American folklore and astute readings of the adult mind, where he chiefly finds lament in the wear and tear of eroded ambitions. Spivet’s mother — whom he refers to as Dr. Clair — is a researcher whose professional failures weigh on him. From his science teacher’s name he makes a neologism, Stenpock, meant to refer to any narrow-thinking hack devoid of a hunger for the outré. “Mr. Stenpock always wore a noisy leather jacket while teaching, a fashion statement that tried (and yet failed) to say: ‘Children, I probably do things after school that you are not ready to know about just yet.’ ” (Yes, the young Larsen is funny.) Spivet embodies the uneasy balance of innocence and insight prevalent in depictions of children, and he remains in some ways closest in the playground to Henry James’s Maisie, in “What Maisie Knew,” a young girl, enduring her parents’ savage divorce, whose stepfather correctly assesses her psychological aptitude when he declares, “One would think you were about 60.”

Spivet is haunted both by the metaphoric death of his parents’ marriage — they are together but lifelessly so — and by the actual death of his older brother, killed in a shooting accident for which he feels partially responsible. The novel subscribes to the mangled but fashionable notion that genius and obsession are essentially the same thing. And here obsession is more than an attempt to exert control over quotidian uncertainties; it becomes a whole system of ordering a life against tragedy. Finding both comfort and a modest sense of adventure in precision, Spivet maps everything: the Washington, D.C., sewer system of 1959, speculative projections of the United States coastline in the aftermath of various global warming scenarios, birthplaces of the world’s major religions, fiber-optic networks, the reach of urban loneliness. The range of his projects is without limit. As he explains: “There were the illustrations: schematics of industrious leafcutter ant colonies and numerous, multihued lepidoptera; exploding anatomical charts of horseshoe crab circulatory systems; electron microscope diagrammatics of the feathery sensilla in the antennae of the Anopheles gambiae — the malaria mosquito.” With this novel, Reif Larsen seems to be announcing himself as a compassionate observer of prodigy incubated in emotional isolation and, at the same time, as a potentially eviscerating contestant on “Jeopardy!”

It is not always entirely clear which of the two goals he is embracing. “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet” is ultimately a novel to be appreciated rather than adored, devoured or even acutely analyzed, for it is not a narrative that brims with big ideas, and in fact, there is little narrative to speak of. The story is a kind of children’s book version of “Roughing It,” in geographical reverse (I say this not to compare Larsen favorably to Twain as a commentator, but to make a simple thematic analogy), with Spivet vagabonding it on his own to Washington to receive an award for which he is too young by decades, and to learn that the East he has mythologized as a great intellectual frontier is in many ways just a place of self-interested climbers and sound-bite hooey. The novel is full of these easy demystifications: that brilliance doesn’t nurture, that attraction is more than a compatibility of I.Q.’s, that life surprises us, that people aren’t always what they seem. It would not be necessary to consult the author bio to know that Larsen has an M.F.A. — the novel is creatively written, sometimes quite beautifully so. But it is plagued by that sense of writers’ workshop insularity: it doesn’t aim to mean much.

It is also burdened by device. The margins of the book are full of extensive sidebars in small typeface and graphs, charts, drawings, images, all meant to represent the range of Spivet’s fascination and output. After a reference, for instance, to an essay on wormholes, the reader is directed by arrow to further description: “The monograph was by a Mr. Petr Toriano and it was titled ‘The Preponderance of Lorentzian Wormholes in the American Middle West 1830-1870.’ ” It continues. Following some of the marginalia requires repositioning the book, turning it around and sideways, making it something for neither the formalist nor the arthritic. I imagine Larsen was trying to do David Foster Wallace’s deployment of addenda one better. But what he has done, in some sense, instead, is deny the reader’s own instinct for visualization. If you had any inclination to try to picture the mosquito proboscis, or the drainage patterns of bitterroots, let’s just say (or to go look them up), you don’t have to because there they are rendered for you on Pages 26 and 122 respectively. (And just so you know, Larsen produced them himself with Adobe Illustrator.)

Roland Barthes made distinctions between those texts so micromanaged that they ensured reader passivity and those texts, active texts, that invited a greater degree of participation. “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet” merely creates the illusion of choice; you might leaf through it at Barnes & Noble and assume you could simply ignore the sideline material, except that actually you can’t, because Larsen puts key elements of the story in it, essential points about Spivet’s emotional state. The reader’s attentions are consistently shifted, refocused so that suddenly the experience of reading a novel becomes not a refuge from the distraction of Internet life but a more insistent facsimile of it. When you are reading an article online about TARP, you can always choose, say, to link to the résumé of Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, or just forge on ahead, but here you must go to all the places Larsen’s arrows point. And I am here to tell you that it can be exhausting.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET

By Reif Larsen

Illustrated. 375 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95

Correction: July 12, 2009

A picture credit on June 21 with a review of “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet,” by Reif Larsen, misspelled the photographer’s given name. She is Elliott Holt, not Elliot.

Ginia Bellafante is a television critic at The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Map Quest. Today's Paper|Subscribe